My Patreon

Hello all! I need some assistance. I want to remake my Patreon but I need suggestions! What would you like as Tiers? How much would you be willing to give towards weekly-ish updates? Would you prefer to pay monthly or by chapter? Give me ideas pretty please?

Comments

[Cold Spike]

Well, I know looking through popular Patreons for ideas is probably helpful. I would suggest starting with Starscribe's and go from there!

[Voidwalker]

I can contribute the following from personal experience: I am usually very hesitant to support anyone if they have a per-chapter-basis. Because if the writer doesn't feel like it, I don't have to pay anything in months, but if he suddenly has a creative bout, I'm supposed to pay up for multiple chapters in one month. That's more unpredictability than my bank account likes. As the writer in question, you could obviously make a remark telling readers 'there will never be more than two chapters per month' or something, but that begs the question if these readers will actually notice that remark (aka if they will continue to read) after noticing that 'per chapter'-tag.

So I'd say: Always go with 'per month'.

As for the amount, many don't have pockets that are all that deep. And as a Patreon user you're probably more after 'getting little from many' than the 'whaling' many game publishers do these days. So maybe build your tiers like 5 bucks, 10, 20, 40 or something like that. (I'm usually going for 5 or 10, because I'm not rich and I want to support more than one creator. It's extremely rare that I go for more.)

Another note: Many offer access to Discord servers as a means to entice people to go for higher tiers. Maybe I'm too much of an oldtimer, but I don't use discord, I don't like discord, and I will never, ever enter such a server. Point being: Whatever you offer per tier, keep in mind that some people might not care about what you're offering there. (Which is obviously fine, you don't have to cater to everyone, and really, you shouldn't either. Just something to keep in mind, as I said.)

Again from personal experience, people like to have a say. The occasional poll here and there could be fun, if you can and want to work with such.

And as a final note for now, I've seen some artists offer the option to refrain from cashing in their rewards in exchange for getting something bigger after a set amount of months. (For example, instead of a monthly doodle, you could get a full-fledged image after six months.) I suppose you could offer writing something 'personal' for those who wish to go for it. If you're up for that, I'd suggest this: Don't necessarily chain it to the highest tier if you don't want/need to. Set a price tag for that special reward. Let's say, for example's sake, a one shot of up to 10k words within a list of following tags would cost 100 bucks. That way, even 'low tier'-patrons could work towards it. It would just take them longer to do it. (Which, as usual with such things, requires patience in exchange for a lower monthly financial burden.)

Hope that helps and good luck with it.